Another Reason to love Paid on Results

Hi,

On the 06th December a visitor to your website clicked on an Affiliate URL
for a Merchant who has closed its Affiliate Program with Paid On Results.

The visitor was shown our Expired Links page, and given several other
related Merchants they may be interested in. This visitor followed one of
our related links and went onto make a purchase with Find Me A Gift.

Normally the commission due would just be added to your account, however
in this case you are currently not an Affiliate of Find Me A Gift. In
order for us to pass the commission onto you we first need you to join the
Find Me A Gift Affiliate Program

You can do this as normal though your Affiliate Control Panel, once you
have joined and been approved for this Merchant we will add the commission
due to you into your account.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Best Wishes,

Paid On Results Support Team.

Great use of technology to do something to reach a good outcome from an expired link. When the other options are sending the visitor through anyway or landing them on error page actually putting a solution in place that allows me to earn and another merchant to make the sale is fantastic.

A while back Josh Kahlbach got in touch to show me the ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin. I’m using it on one of my sites now so I sent Josh back some questions and here are his answers…

Tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi, I’m Josh Kohlbach, I’m a programmer from Brisbane, Australia. I’m the creator of ThirstyAffiliates affiliate link management plugin for WordPress as well as a handful of other non-premium plugins.

A bit about me?… Hrm, I’ve been into programming since I was about 13 years old (now 26), I have a degree in IT, and I’ve been studying business and marketing in my spare time for about the past 3 or 4 years.

What’s the idea behind this plugin?

The idea behind ThirstyAffiliates is quite simple and I’ve designed it to be a helpful and un-intrusive part of your affiliate marketing workflow.

I came up with the idea of an affiliate link manager after getting frustrated with having to create reviews for a computer hardware review site I was making and not being able to really track where my affiliate links were being used.

After a few times of needing to change one of my affiliate links and tracking down where I used that link in the past I finally did something about it.

Why your plugin and not others which have similar functions?

When I created ThirstyAffiliates I was actually looking for a plugin similar to mine to purchase. But everything in the industry was just so focused on cloaking and being deceptive by keyword link generation all over your blog. It just seemed like there was no tool that really focused on managing the links like assets.

My tool puts the focus on managing affiliate links in one place and providing a really great interface for getting those links into your posts and pages.

I’ve actually crafted a specialised link picker tool just for that. Most other plugins just give you a list of your links to insert or a nasty shortcode to remember which is absolutely useless once you have 100+ links. You really need a proper tool once you’re getting serious about affiliate marketing with more than the odd link here and there.

My plugin also does importing and exporting using the WordPress importer tool which means that you can setup your links once and import them to new websites you’re creating, saving hours of setup.

What other wordpress plugins do you recommend for affiliate marketing?

There are some really great review website plugins out there. If I was making a dedicated reviews website again I’d definitely look into purchasing a premium review plugin. Especially one that gets the social side of things going with user reviews.

Also, not really a plugin, but there’s heaps of great integrations with mailing list providers like MailChimp and Aweber. Drop in their plugin and activate a widget – building a mailing list doesn’t need to be difficult, but it’s something every affiliate should be doing as the engagement on that platform is a lot higher.

Thanks Josh

I’ve posted before about this but take a look at these stats

Two sales from the same cookie which was placed on the 1st October 2006! More than 5 years ago I sent this visitor through and earlier this month they earned me £15. Now I know all the stats probably say that a huge majority of sales take place within the standard 28 day cookie but this shows that it’s certainly not all of the sales. Also note that the same click and cookie led to two sales. Not all programmes will have a cookie which is valid for multiple events. Many are for the first sale only.

Can anyone beat that time between click and sale? Most people would have been through a few computers in that time nevermind not having cleaned out your browser cache and cookies.

I used to have a lot of traffic that worked well for Buyagift and it seems I really should be trying to get that back again instead of chasing single action 28 day cookies. Just to be clear the cookie length for the Buyagift program is 9999 Days

Buyagift are on Affiliate Window and have an impressive Christmas incentive running at the moment.

This is one of only a handful of guest posts I’ve allowed on this blog. I’ve published this one because Finch knows what he is talking about. Check out Finch Sells. It’s full of great information, mainly about CPA offers. My only warning would be that the industrial language might offend some.

An Affiliate Needs More Than Commission

Fraser’s blog here was one of the first I read before carving out a career in affiliate marketing. My first dealings with the industry were purely voyeurism.

I would watch in wonder, sixteen tabs up during my lunch break, trying to understand how such a simple business model could provide such a fundamentally different work environment to my 9-5.

Three years on and my position is reversed. I now shoot off my own advice as a blogger and full-time affiliate.

I get to hear many questions from newbies trying to break in to the industry. The curiosity has grown, and grown. It seems everybody wants a piece of the affiliate marketing pie. But what about those who have been around the block for several years and have felt their love affair with the industry begin to wear off?

I think every affiliate, sooner or later, has to hit the wall.

When the thrill of earning ‘easy money’ wears off – at least, that’s what it’s called by my friends and family – the real challenge of staying motivated kicks in.

Being a middleman is a tough gig. How do you stay motivated without the pride of customers thanking you, or without the credit for driving a company to the next level? We are invisible, and with no attachment to what we sell other than the numbers on the cheques we receive.

I’ve battled for many months to conquer the overwhelming feeling of indifference. Truth be told, once the novelty of making good money wears off, it’s pretty tough to be satisfied – unless you’re working on projects that inspire something greater than financial security.

Clearly, an affiliate needs more than just commission to stay motivated.

It’s hard to get out of bed to work on a website if that website is only ever destined to satisfy a disconnected algorithm in Google’s underbelly. How do you motivate yourself to rank for products that, all commission aside, you barely give a rat’s arse about?

I think this is a problem many affiliate marketers face. They simply fall out of love with their projects. They don’t truly believe in them in the way that a driven entrepreneur should.

It’s one of the reasons so few of our projects ever come to fruition. If we don’t enjoy working on them, we can find plenty of reasons not to work on them. I know I can.

I believe I’ve created the world’s most emphatic repertoire of excuses to justify my own lackadaisical attitude to the websites I don’t like working on. Just last night the dog ate my FTP password.

Indifference, lack of passion, lack of excitement… call it whatever you want. We all need to engage in projects where there’s more than just a financial incentive, but something that gets us out of bed too.

And so, the number one piece of advice I give to new affiliates is pretty simple.

If you wouldn’t do exactly what you’re proposing for the reward of $0, then you probably shouldn’t do it at all. It’s passion and the desire to see projects through to their conclusion that separates the rich from the poor in our business. Do yourself a favour and work on something that gets you out of bed, or you’ll find yourself wishing you were back there long before lunch.

Finch

photo by dmwmartin

A couple of weeks back I went along to WordUp Edinburgh which was an informal one day conference about WordPress. Organised by WPScotland it was a good day to see what everyone else is doing with WordPress. Talks ranged from WordPress in large companies through to voluntary organisations with a mixture of presentation and discussion.

I can’t add much to the many good reports about the conference already written but thought I would note some of the many plugins that were suggested throughout the day.

In no particular order….

For Theme Development and Testing

• Log Deprecated Notices
• Debogger
• Theme Check

For Other Stuff….

• Custom Post Type UI – Making life easier for creating Custom Post types.
• Widget Logic – choose when you want your widgets to appear.
• Image Widget – Uploading images to widgets.
• Chimpexpress – Use existing content from your WordPress site to populate your latest Mailchimp newsletter.
• Mailpress – Similar to the above plugin but without using Mailchimp. Probably only suitable for smaller mailing lists.
• WP Help – Create help information as part of the WordPress dashboard. Ideal for handing over a site to a less experienced editor.
• EasyBlogging – Ideal interface for a new user by hiding away all the complicated stuff!
• Rolescoper – Better control over user roles for multi author blogs.
• Zend Gdata – Clever stuff this one. Allows you to link to data stored in Google Docs. I was shown this for linking rota data in a Google Docs Spreadsheet to the Adelaide Place Baptist Church website and I think it also has much wider potential use.
• ManageWP – This is the worker plugin for the main service at ManageWP. Recommended by both Wordskill & Canary Dwarf. Should make life easier for managing a number of different WP installs. I’m going to explore this one a bit further soon.

I’m sure there were many more plugins suggested as solutions to specific questions but that’s all I managed to scribble down over the course of the day

Perhaps the merchant isn’t quite fully appreciating affiliate marketing or perhaps they just have really really good banners?

I was surprised to read these snippets from some new terms & conditions that The AA is planning to implement for their breakdown cover program.

Only the first purchase made by the customer will be paid out on, and only if they buy the product related to the link that they clicked through.

On the 15th of each month a verification process will go through the system and any sales that don’t meet the above criteria and/or were de-duped against another of the AA’s marketing channels will be deleted from your account.

The first one surprised me more. The second is perhaps more widely spread but I still don’t think it’s reasonable. I’m not active with this merchant but do others think these terms are fair? Would be interested to hear opinions below.